NASA, Navy Team Up For Capsule Recovery

Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 8 is training and preparing for NASA’s unmanned Exploration Flight Test-One (EFT-1) for the Orion spacecraft, scheduled for early next year off the coast of Southern California.

Orion will travel 3,600 miles above the Earth’s surface, more than 15 times farther than the International Space Station, and will ultimately re-enter the atmosphere at a speed of more than 20,000 miles per hour, enduring temperatures up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

HSC-8 will embark NASA engineers on two MH-60S Knighthawks to film and monitor the re-entry and recovery of Orion using state of the art debris tracking software and video equipment.